where it was almost always taken in as particles, that is, non-inflecting, invariable words (Boas’s ~ “attribute complements”, a category that otherwise encompasses native Chinookan onomatopoeia / ideophones); second choice: taken in as a noun, which has extremely little morphological variation in Chinookan (in effect varying by gender and number only).

Why am I saying such obscure things?

My longtime readers can see this coming…

I think it’s very important that we begin to give more recognition to the role of Lower Chehalis (and other southwest Washington) Salish in the early formation of “Chinook Jargon”.

Over the course of several years, my research has, to my surprise, been moving me in the direction of analyzing Chinuk Wawa as a pidgin version of not just Chinookan but of Salish.

I’ve already posted many discussions in this space about the large number of previously unrecognized Lower Chehalis words in the Jargon.

Anthropologists and historians take it as a fact that Lower Chinookans’ language was one that other tribal people perceived as “too hard to learn” — with the result that Lower Chinookans also typically spoke a foreign language, Salish, to make themselves understood.

It can’t be any surprise (but hasn’t previously been demonstrated as far as I’m aware of the research literature) that there would therefore exist traces of such heavy Salish use, left behind in the Lower Chinookan language(s).

Today, unavoidably, I’ll be repeating some points I’ve already written about in this respect — but rest assured, I’ve got a number of new observations about Salish-looking material in Lower Chinookan.

All of this, as I say, is in service to an idea that any pidgin(-creole) of Lower Chinookan speech, which was already bilingual between two unrelated tribal languages, is more accurately called “Chinook-Chehalis Jargon”. (Chinúk-T’səx̣élis Wáwa.)

Let’s revise history!

Look at a list of words…

…wherever I don’t give a source (cited in full on first occurrence only), a word is taken from the Grand Ronde Tribes 2012 dictonary of Chinuk Wawa…

Jargon: k’áynuł ‘tobacco’, said to come from a Chinookan word.

Salish: southwest Washington Salish languages have definitely native words for ‘tobacco’ based on their word for ‘smoke’, as well as this Jargon word; it is potentially an old loan from these Salish languages, since these use a suffix -n̓əł ‘plant’. For a potential Salish root, we can consider Proto-alish *k̓ay̓ ‘to dry out, wither’, which is no longer used in SW WA Salish, so for k’áynuł to be a loan into Chinookan, it would have to be an old one.

Chinookan: all documented languages have this stem, so if it was loaned from Salish to Lower Chinookan, it’s had time to diffuse upstream along the Columbia.

Jargon: pʰáł ‘full’, said to come from Chinookan.

Salish:

Proto-Salish *pəł, *pł-u/ał ‘thick’. This root is seen for example in modern Lower Chehalis pə́ł ‘thick’…

…which, in a suffixed derivation, plus Chinookan-style consonant symbolism (which I think is due to longterm Chinookan-Chehalis bilingualism; see an upcoming post in this space on that), is the source of Chinook Jargon p’íłił ‘thick’.

Note the existence of some variation between /ə́/ and /á/ in the Proto-root & generally in Lower Chehalis.

It may be significant that this root is known to be used metaphorically, for instance in Lower Chehalis pəł-ús [literally ‘thick-face’] ‘forward, pushy’; in Chinuk Wawa compare p’áłił ‘bullshit(ter)’ and expressions listed under p’íłił.

For the proposed ‘FULL’:’HAVE (a lot of)’ metaphor, we can bring in known real-world examples in other languages. Serbo-Croatian says puno (literally ‘full’) for ‘a lot of’. English full comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Greek poly- ‘many’.

Lower Chinookan:

Shoalwater-Clatsop: particle paƛ ‘full’

Kathlamet: particle pał ‘full’ (page 14)

Upper Chinookan:

Clackamas: particle paƛ ‘full’ (page 405)

Wishram: particle pał ‘full’ (page 52) (There seems to be an additional root for ‘full’, seen on the same page when Coyote’s fish trap calls out núłəmst ‘I am full’.)

Jargon: t’łəmínxwət ‘a lie, to tell a lie’, said to come from Chinookan.

Salish: this word looks an awful lot like some root or stem *ƛ̓ə́m ( = *t’łə́m, perhaps at a wild guess *ƛ̓áʔ-m ‘to.search.for-MIDDLE.VOICE’; perhaps also seen in Jargon t’łə́mxwən ‘to prick, stick, stab’) plus the SW Washington Salish lexical suffix =ínwət / =ínut ‘mind’. (So perhaps ‘to search for something in one’s mind’.) This would have to be an old word, as it’s not found in modern SW Wa Salish languages, and there seems to be the alternation of /w/ ~ /xʷ/ that we find sporadically in old words of these languages. Note that those languages now use quite a number of words for ‘lying’, most being obvious or probable metaphors, including ‘talking crazy’. That variability suggests something going on such as a progressive tabooing of words for this antisocial activity.

Salish: SW Wa Salish has a root k̓ʷíʔ ‘to give (as a gift)’; for the metaphor, compare English ‘granted that…’ and many languages’ development of ‘give’ into a sort of imperative/permissive form. Possibly a Salish command form k̓ʷíʔ-aʔ of this root was loaned into Chinookan; compare JK Gill’s dictionary that gives < quitz > as ‘give’ in Chinuk Wawa, apparently from Salish k̓ʷíʔ-aʔ-c ‘give (to) me’.

Kathlamet: particle pat ‘really’ (Boas 1894:218), as well as a couple of Chinookan synonyms

Upper Chinookan (Kiksht):

Clackamas: adverb Gánač̓a ‘really’ (Jacobs 1958-1959:368)

Wishram: Gánuid ‘really’ (Sapir 1901:86)

I realize all of this has seemed pretty dense and technical to some readers.

But I wanted to show some of my thinking about how there’s an old pattern of Salish playing a role, not recognized before, in influencing the old Chinookan languages spoken near it.

The Chinookan languages farther upriver only later, if at all, received the Salish loans, under this scenario.

These social dynamics and loaning patterns would’ve continued into the historical era, which is when phenomena like Chinookan bilingualism in Salish were documented in the first place.

To me all of this looks like a close Indigenous parallel to another dynamic that played into the formation of Chinuk Wawa — the known role of English-speakers in importing Nootka Jargon words into the lower Columbia region.

It’s as if both the Natives and the Newcomers were using their best “foreigner talk” on each other circa 1800…

Post navigation

9 thoughts on “Another reason why it should be called “Chinúk-T’səx̣élis Wáwa””

It seems local Chinook terms with situational words not recorded in the nineteenth century as part of the jargon could be re-introduced to a limited extent. An example would be, ”pox” for fog, ”tol” for house and ”qoat’ for high tide. Even my favorite term for my pooch, ”ik!u’tk!ut”.

Hi Joseph, some of those could be extremely useful in Chinook Jargon! I’m fond of saying that you can definitely change a language — all you have to do is get people to use your words/phrases.

On a related note, we could start talking Chinookan itself again. I’ve been gradually absorbing some of the grammar and vocabulary of Lower Chinookan (Natitanuit, we might call it) through my years of research, and I’m thinking of writing out a user-friendly guide to them…

As someone who reads most, but not everything, on this blog, I’ve forgotten what your take on the issue of pre-European birth is.

The more I myself have learnt about CJ, the more inclined I have become to favour a post-European birth. But since you’re the expert here, I’m open to your arguemnts to the contrary. (I assume everyone agrees that it was the palefaces who introduced the Nootka component, so that wouldn’t be the issue).

While there are lots of shared words (nearly all of them nouns) among PNW languages attesting to age-old intergroup contacts long before that, I don’t find that they or anything in the ethnographic record suggests an actual shared language before about 1800 AD.

Nor should there have been much of a need for a lingua franca, aboriginally, due to the great strength of the practice of exogamy. If you didn’t already know enough languages, you usually were related to someone who knew the language you needed interpretation for.

Just as kin ties among local / ethnic groups conferred rights to natural-resource use in multiple locales, this pattern of exogamy provided you with communicative resources virtually everywhere you were likely to travel.

So multilingualism in the Pacific Northwest was, by any accounts I’ve encountered, highly stable.

Such a setting lacked what I understand as a crucial motivating factor in the formation of a new (i.e. pidgin/creole/mixed) language: a sudden, previously nonexistent need for communication.

I’m very interested in my fellow “creolists’ ” thoughts on all this.

Having delivered this monologue, I specify that I completely honor the beliefs of tribal people of my acquaintance who believe Chinuk Wawa is ancient. I’m not a participant in their cultures and traditions, I don’t claim this language as my property, I just look at with my preferred approach of building beliefs on positive evidence.

Thanks. You mentioned some of the thoughts that I as an outsider have had. Another one that you didn’t mention is the purely geographical aspect: if there actually was a pre-Euro pidgin in the area, isn’t it then a bit too much to ask from coincidence that the first permanent Euro-American establishement just happened to be in the exact area where this pidgin’s lexifier happened to be spoken? (I can’t recall having seen anybody comment to that effect, but it could of course be that I wasn’t alone in ”inventing the wheel”).

And since you’re explicitly asking for input from creolists (though I increasingly hesitate to call myself that, as that subdiscipline is getting less sane by the day):

My experience is that pidgins (and by extension, creoles) do emphatically not emerge just because an area has an impressive linguistic diversity. It usually has been diverse for quite some time, and as you say, people have worked out other ways of communication acoss ethnic borders. Much as you and I admire pidgins as the wonders of human creativity that they are, fact is that people tend to choose another option if there is one to be had.

It is tempting to quote the great Bill Samarin on this point:
”[The] invocation of linguistic diversity as a causative factor is like saying that forests are the cause of forest fires. Without linguistic diversity there would, of course, be no need for lingua francas, but without other factors we cannot explain the emergence of lingua francas in general and of pidgins in particular” (Samarin 1987:70).

So my recipie for pidgin genesis is that the contact is 1) extremely sudden (no time to consider the alternatives), or 2) that the ethnic groups involved really don’t like one another, and thus that their members have no interest in being integrated/assimilated into the other one. It seems to me that the fulfilment of one of these can be enough, but the more, the better, of course (from a pidginistic point of view).

Mutual ethnic dislike has of course accompanied humanity since its birth. But we have not seen the ”suddenness” factor becoming this important before Europea overseas expansion. After all, travelling to another continent then must have been like travelling to another planet now.

This is not to say that only Euro colonialism could create pidgins/creoles – but I am claiming that it was a very unusual era in the history of humankind that by its very nature (and in all its morbidity) provided an extreme lot of pidginogenetic settings.

One of your points that’s a new perspective for me is the “they don’t really like each other” angle. It’s good. I might reframe it, to wrap my mind around it, as “they haven’t yet integrated each other into their social networks — friendship, fictive kin, etc.” Indigenous people and Europeans did indeed immediately set to trying to network with one another in those ways, establishng trading partnerships, intermarrying, reaching formal agreements — whichever were traditional for the ethnic group in question.

(And, a la Chaudenson’s “creolization of culture”, maybe we can conceptualize a metaphorical pidginization of social networks, although I tend to feel a culture is a culture is a culture, just as pidgins are nothing but languages — merely new ones.)

At any rate, I’ve been preaching the suddenness-of-contact theory since a course I gave on Chinuk Wawa at UVic in 2005. I find it proves useful as a tool for finding more pidgins, e.g. the Heiltsuk Pidgin I presented at SPCL a couple years back, which showed up at the brand-new Fort McLoughlin (BC), just where you’d expect.

Suddenness of contact, I agree with you, is not synonymous with Euro colonialism. Instead, it closely shadows rapid technological expansion in modes of travel.

Given your phrasing in terms of “not liking each other”, we have to keep in mind another factor: the parties in a new contact situation have to want to communicate with each other. Just as Euro colonialism isn’t the point, neither is trade — it’s just that strangers who have goods that you perceive as valuable are people you’ll want to learn how to talk to, par excellence. Thus, lots of pidgins are “trade languages”, but “trade language” is not a sufficient definition of “pidgin”.

I give full credit to “creolists” for having shown the importance of demographics. In my experience it’s important to combat Eurocentric assumptions by observing that the pidgins of Northwest North America were all Indigenous-language-based, due to the Native people’s outnumbering and overpowering the Newcomers for several decades. Even “French of the Mountains” — which I’ve also presented at SPCL, as a pidgin of Métis French in northern British Columbia — was successful and durable only because it was a language of Indigenous communities, in that fur-traders had extensively married & integrated into those social networks. (Other) French and English became significant inputs to NW NAm pidgins only as Europeans gained in both numbers and influence. To give a parallel illustration from my research, the first literacy in southern interior BC Indigenous communities was in “Chinuk Pipa” (Chinook writing), and shifted to English only as the latter became incontestably dominant.

All things being equal, then, we could find a pidgin outside a European-related context. A boatload of Chinese traders could have washed up in pre-Columbian Peru with attractive merchandise and advanced weaponry, for instance…

Dave, Mikael: some thoughts of mine on the topic, as a historical linguist dabbling in creolistics.

First, it seems to me that it must be remembered that some 99.9% of all pidgins in the history of humanity have disappeared without leaving a trace. A specificity of Euro colonization was its taking place in a context of expanding literacy, after all, and as a result we know of the existence of various pidgins (Mobilian Jargon, Delaware Jargon, Russenorsk, Greenlandic pidgin, Basque-Icelandic pidgin…) of whose very existence we would have no inkling today had it not been for written material on and in these languages. Not only because these pidgins are extinct, but also because they have had next to no tangible impact upon the languages now dominant where said pidgins once existed.

So: Did Euro colonization indeed generate an unusually large number of pidgins? Or did it record an unusually large number of them? I suspect the latter, frankly: long before Euro expansion, after all, technological change caused abrupt expansion of languages, bringing them suddenly into contact with a great many new ones: think of the overseas expansion of Austronesian speakers from Oceania to Madagascar, of South Semitic spreading into the Ethiopian Highlands, of Greek and Phoenician spreading across the Western Mediterranean, of Bantu spreading across the Southern half of the African continent…or, to take a more relevant case, think of the expansion of the Salish family across the Pacific Northwest. In all these instances, speakers of the various proto-languages must have abruptly come into contact with speakers of numerous different languages, mutually unintelligible and all too often structurally very far removed from their L1. I find it hard to imagine that pidgins, in all the above instances, did not arise as a result of initial contacts involving these and other expanding languages. But until our colleagues over in physics invent a time machine, we do not and cannot (alas) know what those pidgins were like, since we cannot expect these pidgins to have had any long-term impact upon the language(s) which came into abrupt contact once this contact became stable over generations.

Second, it is clear to me that once this contact was stable pidgin genesis must have been rare to non-existent. In the case of the Pacific Northwest the evidence, to me, lies in the very linguistic nature of the Pacific Northwest as a language area: the linguistic convergence implies language contact, but the shared features (Highly complex and cross-linguistically rare consonant phonemes, suppletive verb roots marking singular versus plural actions, lexical suffixes, highly elaborate morphology…) are so blatantly UN-pidgin-like that the language contact which yielded this convergence must be assumed to have involved full bilingualism (indeed, I find it telling that there does not, to my knowledge, exist a single recognized language area whose shared features make the languages, as a whole, more pidgin-like than languages immediately outside this language area). For this reason I too lean towards believing that the birth of Chinook Jargon must be directly related to European exploration/colonization.

Third, my hunch is that what is specific to Euro colonization isn’t the birth of a large number of pidgins, but rather the birth of a large number of creoles (I can explain what I think the causes of this state of affairs were, if either of you or somebody else is interested).

And fourth, I am a bit puzzled, Dave, when you refer to “French of the Mountains” as a pidgin: as I recall it looks more like (L2?) Metis French than like a pidgin.

I agree with Étienne that 99.9% of all pidgins in history probably died unnoticed, and that documentation by westerners is one of two reasons why settings involving Europeans are so overrepresented.

But I still maintain that pidginisation is a rare event indeed in the history of humankind. (And by that I don’t men people speaking with a funny accent, but the development of an actual pidgin).

I also agree that creolisation is a much more of a Euro phenomenon than pidginisation. I’d even say that we can count that as a fact – the vast majority of creoles have European lexifiers, while the pidgin lexifiers are far more varied. I suppose we can ascribe that to Westerners having been better at moving people around who didn’t want to be moved around in the first place.

And finally, I too had the impression that French of the Mountains didn’t look very pidgin-like, although I haven’t seen much, and what little I did see was many moons ago.

I value all of your comments above, Etienne, hayu masi. As for calling F.O.T.M. a pidgin, I admit I was kind of using Thomason & Kaufman’s definitions (1988) to make my own polemical point — that BC is something of a pidgin hotbed. Call F.O.T.M. anything, though, as long as it’s recognized as a contact language!